Updated 10:00 pm, Wednesday, March 4, 2009

It occurred during one of the countless meetings he had with one of umpteen teams in Indianapolis two weeks ago.

"One of the coaches asked me that -- 'Coming from Division II, how is it coming to this combine?' " Reilly said this week. "I told him straight up, 'Hey, I think I'm the best quarterback in this year's draft.'

"I think I caught him off guard, because he looked at me kind of funny. Then I said, 'Hey, I'm not projected as a first-rounder. I'm coming from a small school. But if I don't have that kind of confidence, I'm never going to be able to compete at this level.' "

Score one for the big-armed quarterback from the little school in Ellensburg.

"You've got to love a kid with an attitude like that," said Scot McCloughan, general manager for the San Francisco 49ers.

Reilly has just transitioned from California, where he was training at Elite Athletics with former NFL quarterback Erik Kramer, to Kennewick, where he'll continue preparing for his Pro Day workout at Central on Monday -- and spend time with his fiancée, Jessica Crowe, as they get ready for their wedding April 4.

"This has been bittersweet for her," Reilly said. "She loves the fact that I'm getting an opportunity to do what I love and what my dream was as a little kid. But at the same time, she's not one for the limelight. So when she has a million of her co-workers coming up to her the day after the combine talking about how I worked out, she gets a little embarrassed."

Reilly is aware he needs to make the most of every opportunity in this unusual job-search situation.

"Anytime you're off the radar and you get a chance like this, you have to take advantage of it -- not just on the field, but in the classroom," said Mike Mayock, draft analyst for the NFL Network.

"You can't be afraid. He's the kind of guy that's got to, when he gets in the interview room, be able to show people what he can do and what he understands about the game."

Reilly feels he did just that.

"I was real happy, in the sense that there's no particular area where I think, 'Man, I wish I could go back and do that again,' " he said. "Because this experience is once in a lifetime, I really wanted to try to take full advantage of it.

"It wasn't perfect, by any means. But given the circumstances, I was pretty confident in my abilities and I felt like I had a good performance."

Not that the combine experience isn't strange -- being herded from one thing to another with players that you're basically in competition with at this job fair.

Reilly laughed before offering, "I've got to be honest with you, I thought it was going to be a little bit more difficult because of that. But I went to the East-West Shrine Game, and that kind of blew me away. I wasn't really prepared for that.

"The combine was definitely crazy and definitely nerve-wracking, but the Shrine Game experience prepared me for the combine."

Now, he's prepared to take whatever is thrown his way, in the draft and leading up to it.

Not surprisingly, there is a range of opinions on just where Reilly will be drafted.

"He's a big kid (6 feet 3, 214 pounds) with a good arm and he's going to get a shot somewhere -- probably late in the draft," Mayock said.

But the 49ers rank players in three tiers, and they consider Reilly a second-tier player -- which puts him into the late third- to fifth-round category.

"I hear a lot of positive things about him," McCloughan said. "Our scouts think he's a pretty good prospect. Not a high-round guy, but a middle-round guy that's got some upside."

That's a symphony to the ears of a quarterback who fiddled around on a serpentine of side roads to reach this crossroads in his young life.

Reilly was at Kennewick's Kamiakin High School until he moved to Montana with his family midway through his junior year because his father got a new job.

"It's not an ideal situation," he said of being the new kid at Flathead High in Kalispell. "But I will say this, it was kind of nice at first because all the girls in the new state are tired of all the guys they grew up with and you're something new and interesting -- for a couple of weeks."

Then, Reilly began his college career as a walk-on at Washington State, only to leave for a chance to play -- even if it was at a Division II school. And play he did, breaking the Wildcats record for career passing yards (12,448) that belonged to Jon Kitna, who has had a 12-year NFL career despite entering the league as a rookie free agent with the Seahawks in 1996.

Speaking of the Seahawks, Reilly wouldn't mind hearing from them in April.

"I don't really care where I go, as long as I get on a team," he said. "But I would love to play for Seattle, to be honest with you. I felt like I had a really good meeting with the coaches. They seemed like the type of coaches I would get along very well with, and work well with, and work hard for."